Homelessness in New York City

Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio

Thomas J. Main

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479826964
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique sociale

Can American cities respond effectively to pressing social problems? Or, as many scholars have claimed, are urban politics so mired in stasis, gridlock and bureaucratic paralysis that dramatic policy change is impossible? Homelessness in New York City tells the remarkable story of how America’s largest city has struggled for more than thirty years to meet the crisis of modern homelessness through the landmark development, since the initiation of theCallahan v Careylitigation in 1979, of a municipal shelter system based on a court-enforced right to shelter. New York City now shelters more than 50,000 otherwise homeless people at an annual cost of more than $1 billion in the largest and most complex shelter system in the world. Establishing the right to shelter was a dramatic break with long established practice. Developing and managing the shelter system required the city to repeatedly overcome daunting challenges, from dealing with mentally ill street dwellers to confronting community opposition to shelter placement. In the course of these efforts many classic dilemmas in social policy and public administration arose. Does adequate provision for the poor create perverse incentives? Can courts manage recalcitrant bureaucracies? Is poverty rooted in economic structures or personal behavior? The tale of how five mayors—Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg and de Blasio—have wrestled with these problems is one of caution and hope: the task is difficult and success is never unqualified, but positive change is possible. Homelessness in New York City tells the remarkable story of what happened—for good and sometimes less good—when New York established the right to shelter.

1

The Beginnings of Homelessness Policy under Koch

In the mid-1970s the problem of homelessness achieved a new visibility on the New York City scene. Literally. Prior to the early 1970s the phenomenon of homelessness—that is, of people who, lacking other accommodations, lived and slept predominantly in public spaces such as the streets, transportation facilities, parks, and other situations not intended for human habitation—was confined mostly to the Bowery, the city’s skid row neighborhood. Some classic studies of this milieu began in the early 1960s and reported that the homeless—then often referred to as “derelicts” and “vagrants”—rarely ventured outside of the Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.1 Increasingly throughout the seventies, however, the homeless came to be encountered across Manhattan and the city as a whole. Over the years, the New York Times and other media documented this spreading crisis.

A Times article from 1971, “Alone and Homeless, ‘Shutouts’ of Society Sleep in Doorways,” noted that

[t]he doorway of the Chase Manhattan Bank is one of half a dozen recessed entry ways on Lexington Avenue between 42nd and 44th Streets that serve as places to sleep for homeless and penniless vagrants drawn to the anonymity of the Grand Central Terminal area. . . .

There are numerous places for doorway sleepers around the city: Pennsylvania Station, the Port Authority bus terminal, Herald Square. Some sites, in Chinatown and along the Upper East Side, are new. All have seen an influx in recent years of derelicts, many of whom formerly slept along the Bowery but who have dispersed largely because of police “clean-up” drives.2

The article was illustrated with a photograph captioned “On Lexington Avenue: A person sleeping outside a shoe store north of 42^nd Street.”

Whether police action was primarily the cause of the dispersion of the homeless is doubtful, but in any case the Times continued to document the phenomenon. The title of a 1973 article reported, probably inaccurately, that “The Derelict Population Is Declining” and more cogently added, “But the Whole City Is Its ‘Flophouse.’” The article continued:

For whatever reason, substantial numbers of derelicts are now visible far from the Bowery—in and around Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station, near Gramercy Park, on Lexington Avenue in the 30’s, on Broadway from the 70’s through the 90’s and in construction sites anywhere, particularly those that have aluminum corridors for pedestrians.

There are also derelicts who regularly sleep in the darkened archways and alleys of city buildings in lower Manhattan. The police report an increase in the number of derelicts living under the Boardwalk at Coney Island, under the Brooklyn Bridge, near the old Police Headquarters at 100 Center Street, and on 125th Street in Harlem.3

The article also documented the presence of homeless people in the Bronx and Staten Island and included a photograph of “[a] woman in search of food poring over the contents of a trash receptacle at Third Avenue and 70^th Street.”

Still on the story in 1976, the Times published an article entitled “Vagrants and Panhandlers Appearing in New Haunts,” which confirmed that

[t]he Bowery scene has spread. In the late hours vagrants can now be found singly and in twos and threes in the triangles on Broadway from Herald Square to 72nd Street, along the southern edge of Central Park, in the side streets of Times Square, around the fountained plazas of the Avenue of the Americas, along Lexington Avenue above 42nd Street, in the small parks of the Lower East Side and in Trinity Place. . . .

In a three-mile walk on the West Side one recent summer night, a reporter saw about 50 vagrants. Half a dozen were shopping-bag ladies, who bridled fiercely when approached. The rest were apathetic or asleep, several were dead drunk and many had bottles bulging from pockets.

On a stairway leading to the garage beneath the Coliseum, on Columbus Circle, a barelegged woman in her 30’s slept. On the floor of the men’s room below a young man sprawled unconscious among his ragged belongings.4

This article, too, was accompanied by photographs, one captioned, “In various places in Manhattan, particularly near bright lights, the vagrants may be found sleeping where they can.”

By the early 1980s social science research backed up the Times’ reportage: homeless people were visible all over the city, especially Manhattan. Anthropologist Kim Hopper’s ground-breaking ethnographic account of this reality deserves to be quoted at length:

In the summer of 1980. . . . [o]n the outside plaza of the Garden alone, it was not unusual to find 75 men and women sleeping there at dawn.

Another quick count, made between 5:30 and 6:00 on a summer morning in 1982, revealed 62 men and women sleeping along the southern perimeter of Central Park. The outreach team serving homeless people in the park reported that there were at least a hundred living there on a relatively permanent basis. The director of security for Amtrak at Penn Station estimated that at the time about 150 homeless people “consider[ed] the station home.” In a single month, mid-January to mid-February 1984, the outreach team serving the Port Authority Bus Terminal made 2,400 contacts (including, no doubt, many duplications) with homeless people in the station.

In many areas of Manhattan (the region I explored most intensively), men could be found sleeping wherever haven, however tentative, presented itself: in the steam tunnels that ran under Park Avenue, alongside railroad tracks and service yards; in vest-pocket parks, recessed doorways, and storefronts along major thoroughfares; in abandoned buildings and deserted subway stations; in the loading bays of manufacturing firms; in storage bunkers below the entrance ramps to highways; in the lower stairwells and basements of unlocked tenements; under bridges and in parking lots; and in makeshift camps along unused rail lines, closed highways, and derelict freight yards. In the early morning hours, some public places resembled nomadic encampments, with linked cardboard boxes serving as individual sleeping quarters. . . .

Things had changed on the street since the days of skid row, and the changes were apparent to anyone who had spent time there.5

Eventually, various groups began to respond to this situation. One of the groups that was most active in the cause of the homeless in the early eighties was Coalition for the Homeless (CFTH). CFTH was born when two streams of social activism that had started independently of each other came together. One stream was that of legal activism, headed by Robert Hayes, a New York lawyer. Another stream was one of advocacy research sponsored by an independent research center, the Community Service Society of New York (CSS) and conducted by Kim Hopper and Ellen Baxter, Columbia University graduate students in medical anthropology and public health, respectively.

Robert Hayes began investigating the condition of the New York City homeless in 1978. Even then the city ran a shelter system, which at the time was a system of lodging houses and auxiliary services for those who had nowhere else to go. Hayes investigated the various kinds of lodging to which the city directed homeless people: the Men’s Shelter at 8 East Third Street, which was the principal intake point for the rest of the men’s shelter system; the Bowery hotels—or flophouses—to which the Men’s Shelter issued vouchers; and later the Keener building (an abandoned mental institution on Wards Island opened in 1979 to accommodate the growing demand for shelter). At the time Hayes began his work, the city sent men applying for shelter to the Bowery hotels, or to Camp LaGuardia, a shelter sixty miles from the city designed to accommodate older clients. If both these places were filled, men slept in the “big room,” the largest room of the Men’s Shelter. Once the big room was filled, other applicants were simply denied shelter.

Back in the late seventies and early eighties, the Men’s Shelter at 8 East Third Street, located in the heart of Manhattan’s Bowery, was a frightening place for anyone not inured to life on the streets. On my visits around 1983, there were always many ragged, unclean men loitering on the sidewalk for half a block on either side of the entrance. Even before one entered, a strong unpleasant odor was very noticeable. Inside, scores of men waited in no apparent order to be seen by the “5 x 8 staff,” so called because their perfunctory interview produced an index card with some basic information about the applicant. Security was not evident, and on one occasion I was unpleasantly approached by one of the men. Such security as there was focused on protecting the front office from break-ins. The New York Times remembered, “Chaos reigned as men checked in for meals and vouchers that purchased beds in nearby flophouses. Between meals, homeless men milled constantly on the street, dealing drugs and panhandling.”6 A staff member once told me that the Men’s Shelter sometimes offered internships to students from a nearby university who were getting their degree in social work. Many of those students would take one look, or perhaps sniff, at the Men’s Shelter, and that was the end of their aspirations to do social work.

Bonnie Stone, the first assistant deputy administrator at the Human Resources Administration (HRA), which was in charge of services for single homeless men in the late seventies and early eighties, also remembered the old Men’s Shelter:

But the place was frightening. . . . [I]t was a huge building, with huge cavernous spaces and there were echoes everywhere. And you would see hundreds of people going around in very, very bad . . . physical shape. . . . You would drive past them on the Bowery and you’d see them bloody and incoherent on the street, well they would be the same way in the shelter. And there were hundreds of them. And the place was dark and loud and had bad smells and it was a little bit like entering Dante’s Inferno. . . . And it had been there for decades.7

This remained a fair description of the big room up until the Men’s Shelter was renovated in the early nineties.8

Hayes continued his interviews with many homeless men and learned, according to CFTH literature, that they “found the streets and subways less dangerous and degrading” than the shelter system. “Streets were [the] preferred option . . . because conditions at the city shelter were so abominable.” He therefore felt that “the demand for shelter beds was far lower than the true need since conditions at the municipal shelter effectively deterred many of the homeless from even seeking shelter.”9

At this point Hayes decided to do something—and what he did seems to have been determined by his belief that what was needed was “recognition with the force of law of a right to shelter.” The reasoning, apparently, was that if shelter were recognized as a right, rather than as a matter of social service, then no one could legitimately be deterred from claiming it. The conceptualization of the problem—as one of rights—also determined the avenue through which it would be settled: the courts. CFTH was aware of this implication, and of the problems it might raise. A CFTH report, “Litigation in Advocacy for the Homeless,” stated that “[i]t is rare that a ‘right to shelter’ will be forthrightly espoused in any jurisdiction. Instead, the more probable course would be one which would require creative interpretation of a more general statutory and constitutional language to arrive at an enforceable entitlement.”

Such creative work is what Hayes then began. He found entitlements to shelter implied in the New York State Constitution, the New York State Social Service...